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New Kids on the Block: Understanding Developers Entering the Workforce Today
- patrick_99 9y agoThey say $40k is the median salary for new developers in Canada, this is much lower than I've observed and it makes me question the quality of the entire dataset. Are these really professional software developers who answered the survey?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- d4mi3n 9y agoFrom what I've been told by Canadian co-workers, software salaries in the country are _significantly_ less for equivalent work compared to the US. Something 1/2 to 2/3 as much.
- holydude 9y agoWhich is not surprising is it. Canada is not the US even if the people speak the same language. You cant really talk about equivalent work if the settings are different for people and entire industries.
- lr4444lr 9y agoI don't know how big the effect would be, but surely that is perhaps skewed by the NYC/Silicon Valley salary premium for their real estate markets?
- zzalpha 9y agoI agree, that number is absurdly low. I made more than that during an internship back in the early 2000s...
- scj 9y agoThe 2008 recession knocked salaries down in Canada.
- bobabooey02 9y agoNot just in Canada. I'm about to graduate in the third largest city in my state, and I can only find jobs that pay around $35k/yr. The fact is that most new or good paying jobs are being concentrated to only a few areas of the country. They form economic bubbles that are insulated from the fact that most of the country is seeing a decline in quality of life due to lower wages, higher costs, and less worker leverage. This economic ignorance is a big reason why big cities don't understand the rise of Trump.
- kasey_junk 9y agoThe third largest city in a given state could be anything from a million people to 30k people. I wouldn't expect a town of 30k (or even 100k) to have that many jobs for developers as it's a fairly specialized industry. 50 years ago you wouldn't find actuarials or design engineers in small towns either.
- bobabooey02 9y agoMy point still stands. People In this thread are talking like $40k/yr salaries are unheard of, yet aren't acknowledging that the economy of the high growth cities is nothing like the rest of the country.
- kasey_junk 9y agoBut if there is 1 job in a 30k town and 100k in a city of 2 million, then the salary of that 1 job doesn't matter much for an average salary calculation. For the profession of software engineer, most of the jobs are in the higher salary bands there should have an outside impact on the average calculations.
- 9y ago
- caseysoftware 9y agoI believe these are mostly brand new grads, so salaries would be lower. It also explains the extremely short term thinking - free lunch vs retirement - of the entire data set.
- uiri 9y agoThe salaries for the US also look weird to me. Canadian new grads tend towards $60-70k with larger American companies paying closer to $80-90k in the same location. My sampling is heavily biased towards Ontario. I expect Greater Vancouver to be similar but perhaps the rest of Western Canada, along with Quebec and the maritimes are dragging the average down.
- dron57 9y agoAlberta pays about the same. This is still a long shot from the US and is a major factor why we're always gonna be stuck with a brain drain to the US.
- sotojuan 9y agoThe US is not Silicon Valley or NYC. Between the coasts, a lot of developers get <$70k per year salaries. Maybe it's the same for Canada?
- Khao 9y agoIt's $40k USD which means it's at least $50k CAD. It seems about right for recent graduates with less than 2 years experience. I'm in Montreal btw.
- mmjaa 9y agoWe go through this, generally, every 4 years. I don't know why it feels like 4 years is the 'period' of new-school-hacker-on-the-scene, it just feels like it from the perspective of industry/capitalism out here in the workforce. Perhaps its because it seems like 4 years is the mean time between start and end of the new-school; i.e. it takes at least 4 years for the group who have forgotten how to do the old stuff to be replaced by the group who don't know anything about the old stuff, and just re-invent it all again, with bells and whistles, and .. y'know .. youth'y cool.
- bigtex 9y agoDo you have the right stuff?
- bigtex 9y agoMan, a tough crowd here today. So no one remembers the New Kids on the Block craze back in the late 80's? Girls writing NKOTB on their book covers?
- juliasilge 9y agoOh, I remember.
- bluetwo 9y agoHey new developers: A fully funded retirement = Freedom I know it doesn't seem important now, but if you focus on this early in your career, you'll have a lot of flexibility later in your career.
- virmundi 9y agoThe problem is that many investment products in 401ks under perform. At my last company the best fund netted on 4%. Since I now manage my own IRA, I get 15-20%.
- akgerber 9y agoAll the 401ks I've had in my career (mostly at 'startups'), even relatively poor ones, have offered at least one Vanguard index fund and/or target date fund-of-funds.
- yequalsx 9y agoIt is not possible for everyone to get this return. Managing your own IRA may be a good idea for some but it isn't for everyone. And a 15%-20% return s not realistic for more than a small percentage of people.
- kcorbitt 9y agoMost 401(k)s have at least one S&P 500 or US total market fund with low expense ratios. If anyone out there reading this doesn't know what that looks like, feel free to email me with the options your company provides and I can help you choose the right one. Like the GP says, this stuff is important, and if you set it up now you'll thank yourself later. Re: getting 15-20%: there will be years that you can do this (heck, the S&P 500 returned 32% in 2014) but I certainly wouldn't count on getting those returns long-term. Consider that if you have $500k today and are able to successfully invest it at 20% returns, you'll be a billionaire in under 40 years. There are people who have done it (Warren Buffett and perhaps a few others), but if you're one of them you probably have better things to be doing with your time than posting on Hacker News. :)
- 9y ago
- austincheney 9y agoA have worked most of my career all over the travel industry and there is a huge shift I have noticed in the past couple of years. First of all the companies in this space are massive having thousands of developers and secondly these companies typically have an old industrial mindset of never firing or retiring people and absolutely never making hard transitional decisions that impact the work force. All of these companies are shifting as much as they can, if they aren't there already, to conduct as many transactions as possible over a website. Most of these companies have been around forever and have been engaged with selling online, in some capacity, since the 90s. The problem with that is that until about 9 years ago web technologies were slow and nobody took them seriously. Even now formal training in web technologies is rare. This is problematic because more is continually demanded from web technologies and the majority of the work force is completely lost. The universal technology in every one of these companies is Java and it dominates nearly all aspects of development at every stage. Java isn't a web technology. The result of that problem differs by company due to internal perceptions of technology and company culture. One company I worked with was growing its revenue and market incredibly fast outpacing their peers and historical norms. This group had the freedom to make candid decisions about their future and reality in general. They had the most bench-warmers of any group I worked with, but they also realized the future is in JavaScript instead of Java. The challenge is that legacy developers wanted to learn this "new" way, but transitioning is hard, especially if you aren't doing that work in your job. There was a lingering fear of obsolescence here. One company I worked for refused to figure it out. They were confronted by all manners of technology decisions they could not agree upon resulting in different layers of management doing their own things without agreement. The only strong part of that business was marketing. The company folded and somebody bought the brand for super cheap with a skeleton crew. One company I worked for waited very late to accept this reality and struggled to figure it out. There is a JavaScript layer, which is largely a vanity architectural layer over and reliant upon the legacy Java layer. This group has done well by cornering large areas of the marketing and acquiring competition. The technology is slow compared to their competitors, expensive to maintain, and very painful to work on. Many of the developers refused to abandon doing as much as possible in Java and will often block new code submissions that could be better served in Java. There was no fear of obsolescence because nobody in a decision making capacity was willing to do things in a new ways. I cannot imagine what this industry will look like 10 years from now as the technologies and developers continue to age and new blood continues to either burn out or grudgingly conform to the old technologies.
- OedipusRex 9y agoI graduated in May from a Big 10 college with a computer technology degree. As much as remote work seems great, I still need a senior level developer I can walk over to and ask questions of. As well, the program I was in was in a constant state of flux, and the incoming freshmen are able to choose a lot of targeted tracks like Cyber Security, Forensics, High Performance Computing, etc. When I started there were too options: one focused on the business side and one on the engineering side.
- pkamb 9y agoI'm surprised to see "desktop applications developer" in front of "mobile developer". Where are these desktop jobs, and desktop applications? The work I see in the Apple world is mainly iOS, with some macOS. Do Windows developers make up the difference?
- kasey_junk 9y agoYes. There is a whole world of windows applications out there doing central line of business work for all the unsexy but more common businesses throughout the country.
- hackernewsacct 9y agoThis report (and others) suggest companies are hiring those with non-CS degrees. If this is the case, then how do self-taught or non-CS majors get hired when the bar to entry is solving medium to hard level leetcode problems?
- khalilravanna 9y agoA part of the puzzle might be that being good at solving interview questions is orthogonal to having CS coursework under your belt. I can speak anecdotally from my own experience in that I didn't get good at those types of problems until I spent my own time working on them.